Mark Wilson I am the creator of TopXML. I am available for international and local (Australia) contracts. I am a Solution Architect/Business Analyst. I have worked in IT in several countries (NZ, Australia, South Africa, UK) building and training teams for government and very large non-governmental organizations. I am ex-Microsoft Consulting Services. I wrote the first book on Microsoft XML published in 2000 called XML Programming with VB and ASP. Most recently I have been building tools for the SEO industry. Ask me for a 37 point SEO health-checkup for your website.
In this chapter, I'm going to start working with the Extensible
Styles Language (XSL). XSL has two parts
a transformation language, and
a formatting language.
The transformation language lets you transform documents into
different forms, while the formatting language actually formats and
styles documents in various ways. These two parts of XSL can function
quite independently, and you can think of XSL as two languages, not
one. In practice, you often transform a document before formatting it
because the transformation process lets you add the tags the
formatting process requires. In fact, that is one of the main reasons
that W3C supports XSLT as the first stage in the formatting process,
as we'll see in the next chapter.
This chapter covers the transformation language, and the next
details the formatting language. The XSL transformation language is
often called XSLT, and it has been a W3C recommendation since
November 11, 1999. You can find the W3C recommendation for XSLT at
http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
XSLT is a relatively new specification, and it's still developing
in many ways. There are some XSLT processors of the kind we'll use in
this chapter, but bear in mind that the support offered by publicly
available software is not very strong as yet. A few packages support
XSLT fully, and we'll see them here. However, no browser supports
XSLT fully yet.
I'll start this chapter with an example to show how XSLT
works.
